Category: Wednesday’s Child

If epochs have sounds epitomizing them, as the pealing of church bells and the rustling of crinolines may have been for some in the West just four or five generations ago, then the sound most characteristic of the present is the woodpecker noise of an acrylic fingernail upon the tempered glass of the smartphone. Like the jingle that haunts the man on the bus in Mark Twain’s story – remember? “A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,/A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,/A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,/Punch in the presence of the passenjare!” – this...

“Now, when our enemies hear the F-35 engines, when they’re roaring overhead, their souls will tremble and they will know the day of reckoning has arrived.” Now that I am in London, I see it all rather more clearly. In Palermo in September, such things tend to get veiled in sea mist, and the fragrance of roasting peppers wafting upward from the apartment below does little for the sharpness of the geopolitical picture. From this perspective, the morbid irony of an American president elected on a ticket of isolationism who speaks in the idiom of Kim Jong-un, or perhaps of...

Last week a reader complimented my parody of “preternaturally American” English, a patois favored not only by gum-chewing schoolgirls and their future husbands, but also by demagogues of every persuasion, notably Russian propagandists broadcasting to the West.  A key element of its sentence structure is the word “like,” at times roughly equivalent to the traditional locution “that is to say,” but most often an interjection signaling approximation, relation, or equivalence. It occurs to me that the almost universal acceptance of this word in its neologistic role has a significance that runs deeper than mere misuse of language.  It is to...

In Italy, a sagra is a local fair, festival, or fête, usually – oh, but let us be truthful, invariably – dedicated to food, and sometimes accompanied by a historical pageant, a sporting event, a marionette show, or some other spectacle that may aid digestion. There is a Frog Festival at Casteldilago near Arrone, an Onion Festival at Cannara, a Stuffed Eggplant Festival in Savona, a Lattarino Festival on Lake Bolsena, in homage to a local fish by that name and now in its forty-second year, a Frico Festival in Friuli, involving an italianized cheese-and-potato rösti, and an almost infinite...

As a young jobbing journalist in London I used to do a lot of book reviewing for The Times, then still the pre-eminent paper in Britain.  They paid me £1 a word, which meant that even at the rate of two or three pieces a month body and soul could be kept together, with a bob or two left over for cigarettes and booze.  Last week I was trawling through old photocopies of some of my clippings and found one that made me giggle, dated April 8, 1989 and entitled “Diary of a Nobody.”  I’m quite sure that Rupert Murdoch,...

A capital delusion of the rich, to the effect that money can be transmuted into beauty, is dwarfed by a mass delusion of the poor, to the effect that beauty can be transmuted into money.  As in the case of nuclear transmutation in physics, neither of the two processes is an impossibility. Yet scientists warn that while particle bombardment can easily turn gold into a base metal like lead, the reverse, though possible in theory, is far too costly and time-consuming to be of any practical benefit to the avaricious. An alchemist, or for that matter anybody who’s got his...